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99 ways to shred your credibility

Chris Morley, Dalton McGuinty's former chief of staff, leaves Queen's Park after testifying at the committee hearings into the cancelled gas plants in Oakville and Mississauga.
Photo: Matthew Sherwood for National Post

TORONTO — There may be 50 ways to leave your lover, as per the singer/songwriter Paul Simon and his 1975 song of the same name, but there are apparently at least 99 ways to leave your government job — and all of them have you merrily deleting and shredding as you go.

This was the message from one of Dalton McGuinty’s former chiefs of staff, Chris Morley, who came before the Ontario legislature’s standing committee on justice policy at Queen’s Park on Tuesday.

It’s not, you understand, he wanted to be pressing delete and destroying documents as he left the then-premier’s office last June. He had to do so, or, if you like, Big Brother made him do it.

“There are at least 99 different reasons why political and public service staff must delete a document,” Morley said several times, with a straight face too.

Ostensibly, he was there to testify about his knowledge about the Liberal government’s controversial and expensive decision to cancel two gas plants in Mississauga and Oakville and about the curious paucity of records on that very subject from the former premier’s political staff.

Amusingly, Morley arrived at the committee room with a cardboard box, prompting giddy speculation perhaps he was bringing copies of his recovered emails and saved documents.

Alas, the box was full of binders for the media maggots in attendance.

And, as Morley soon made clear, among the 300 pages he recently handed over to the Archives of Ontario, “There are no documents related to the issue this committee is exploring.”

But really, he came to educate committee members — and everyone else — about the rules, which was awfully good of him since he is out of government (he now works for Labatt Breweries of Canada).

But then, as Morley said once, when asked if Information & Privacy Commissioner Ann Cavoukian got it wrong in her report this month when she found government staff broke the rules, “No, I’m saying I’m the only one in this room today” who has thoroughly researched the subject.

In fairness, there’s a great whack of these rules, some of which Morley kindly reproduced in the nice binders he handed out.

Also included, under a headline that read “What the Ontario Government Rules Say: When It Is Okay to Delete and Destroy Records,” were the 99 mentions he found.

In doing this, Morley performed a tremendous public service, in that he provided Ontarians with a useful view of their government in action.

The bottom line of all the rules is political and public service staff leaving government are allowed or required to delete or destroy certain kinds of records — chiefly, those that are duplicates, transitory (that is, of fleeting value), personal, political and constituency-related, and drafts.

But, this being government, it is not said coherently or concisely; thus, the 99 mentions, most in two pieces of governing regulations — the Premier’s Office Records Schedule and the Government of Ontario Common Records Series Transitory Records – but a couple from a piece Morley found on the web called The Fine Art of Destruction: Weeding Out Transitory Records.

For instance, of Morley’s 99 beloved mentions, no fewer than 28 deal with duplicate records.

The government has many, many ways to describe duplicates, among them, “surplus documents,” “annotated duplicates,” “copies,” “distribution copies,” “duplicate stocks,” “duplicate copies,” “extra or additional copies,” “files belonging to other offices or branches within the government” and “records which are duplicates.”

There also were 15 different ways to say “drafts,” too, among them “rough notes,” “preliminary versions of documents,” “working materials,” records “created for short-term informational purposes” and “records used … in the preparation of a subsequent record.”

Given the variety and breadth of what must or can be deleted and destroyed, it’s a miracle there is any record about any government decision, least of all about an unpopular one that will cost taxpayers $585 million.

Now, Morley was never one of the alleged main perpetrators in the astonishing paucity of documents produced by the political staff for the former energy minister or McGuinty.

Those honours belong to Craig MacLennan, the energy minister’s former chief of staff who testified at committee he routinely deleted all emails, and David Livingston, another of McGuinty’s former chiefs of staff, who sought advice on how to permanently delete emails.

Both men were named and roasted in Cavoukian’s scathing report.

But Morley nonetheless worked for McGuinty and was for a time at least involved in the gas plant file for the then-premier, so a fair question is how much he was a part of what Cavoukian calls a “verbal culture” in McGuinty’s office — in other words, one where potentially embarrassing documentation was resisted — and that caused her such “great concern.

“Without a written record of how key government decisions are made, the government can avoid disclosure and public scrutiny as to the basis and reasons for its actions,” she said.

Cavoukian found it “truly troubling and hard to believe” the energy minister’s office “could produce absolutely no records” and the former premier’s office would have “so few records.”

Morley remained doggedly on message.

At one point, during a testy exchange with New Democratic Party house leader Gilles Bisson, he said, rather ruefully, “I find it very difficult you folks are not interested in discussing what the rules are.”

“I don’t buy anything you’re saying,” Bisson replied. “I’m sorry … How’s anyone going to believe that you took notes on everything but the gas plants? Doesn’t that leave a huge hole you can drive a Mack truck through, and call into question your credibility?”

No doubt Morley knows the government rules on Mack trucks too, and the size of holes they are simply not allowed — even forbidden — to fit through.

Christie Blatchford was born in Quebec and studied journalism at Ryerson University in Toronto. She has written for all four Toronto-based newspapers. She has won a National Newspaper Award for column... read more writing and in 2008 won the Governor-General’s Literary Award in non-fiction for her book Fifteen Days: Stories of Bravery, Friendship, Life and Death from Inside the New Canadian Army.View author's profile